John W. James

Where were you when I needed you?

The saddest question we ever hear is, "Where were you when I needed you?"

That's what people ask when they find out what we do in helping grievers. We're presenting helpful and accurate information on this site, at the time you need it most, with the hope that you'll never need to ask that question.

It's an honor and a sad privilege to be addressing you, knowing that each of you has recently experienced the death of someone important to you. We also know some of you are reading this because of your care and concern for someone who is confronted by the death of someone important in their life.

We bring our personal experience in dealing with the deaths of people who were important to us, and our professional know-how in helping grievers for more than 30 years. We'll help you distinguish between the "raw grief" that is your normal and natural reaction to the death, and the equally normal "unresolved grief" that relates to the unfinished emotions that are part of the physical ending of all relationships.

A basic reality for most grieving people is difficulty concentrating or focusing. With that in mind, we asked Tributes.com to print our articles in a large type font to make them easier to read. Sharing our concern for grieving people, they agreed.

Ask The Grief Experts

Unique question about how we refer to someone who has died. (Published 1/7/2014)

Q:

I can't ask this question without sobbing. We (my husband and I) lost our son in May, two weeks before school was out, in a drowning incident. He was seventeen. He had passed his Grad Exams, made A/B honor roll, kept his room clean; he was the ideal child.

I have many questions about what to do next, but the main one right now is concerning my other four children. My sixteen and thirteen year old girls can't seem to relate to me casually talking about him as though he was still here. They look at me as if I were crazy. They act as though I should talk about him in the past tense. So, they don't talk about him at all.

But at the same time they don't want me to change anything in his room or let the next oldest boy move into his room. How do I communicate my feelings about him and the need to talk about him to them, and get them to do the same?

A Grief Expert Replies:

Dear Anon,

Thanks for your note and concerns and question.

In response to many of the questions we get here at Tributes.com, our first comment is to say how often we hear the kind of issue they have brought up. But your note contains something that we’ve rarely heard. You indicate that your daughters react negatively to you talking as if your son was still alive, yet they want to preserve his room the way it is and leave it unoccupied. Based on our experience talking to thousands of grievers, those two things don’t usually go together.

And, when you indicate that you talk of your son in the present tense, but you want to move your other son into that room, those things also don’t match up for us, based on our experience.

However, nothing is really wrong with either you or your daughters.

One of the issues may be the newness or rawness of your son’s death for all of you. After all, May is only a little more than four months ago, and while time doesn’t heal emotional wounds, it does take some time to adapt to the new, painful, unwanted reality of a death—and sometimes even more so when the death is to a young person and therefore doesn’t make sense.

Unless you have something strongly against it, we’d recommend that you begin to refer to your son in the reality of the fact that he’s no longer alive. That may help your girls adapt and be more accepting of making the changes to his room and to having your other son move in to that room.

We have to guess that everybody in your home has a broken heart, and we know that each person can have different feelings and different ideas about how to talk and what to do.

Perhaps if you just tell the girls the truth about how sad you are, maybe they will do the same. Then the issues will be on the real topic – everyone’s grief – and the matter of the room will resolve itself.

At Tributes.com we believe that Every Life has a Story that deserves to be told and preserved.

Tributes.com is the online source for current local and national obituary news and a supportive community where friends and family can come together during times of loss and grieving to honor the memories of their loved ones with lasting personal tributes.